Three years after a brush with the YouTube algorithm turned him unexpectedly into a minor indie-pop star, Nicolas Muñoz still sounds unsure about what to do next.
If social media is good for one thing, it’s making people famous very quickly. No longer must artists claw their way through arenas of authenticity and endure demands that they conform to the tastes of the powerful. No more do they need the co-signs of a thousand petty tyrants at record labels here and nightclubs there. Musicians in the age of social media need only engage with raw consumer demand, and in that freedom they’ll find something real, and share it with us listeners. Or so we’d hope.
Boy Pablo's video for “Everytime” went crazy on Youtube, and it's easy to see why: skater boys smirking in streetwear on the banks of a drifting river in Norwegian twilight. At the end, there’s a dog on a boat. It's a vibe; people, young people especially, go nuts for that sort of thing. When Nicolas Muñoz, the Chilean-Norwegian 21-year-old behind Boy Pablo, released the Soy Pablo EP tens of millions of views later in 2018, it was full of more songs like “Everytime.” The mopey, dopey lyrics retained their winking melodrama, but the novelty wore off.
In Boy Pablo’s debut full-length, Wachito Rico, Muñoz dips back into the same rapidly-depleting well: Stratocasters jangle, synth pads yawn, major seventh chords are tossed out with abandon. The album is filled with nearly indistinguishable third-hand indie-pop songs, with titles like “i hope she loves me back,” “hey girl” and “leave me alone!” Sadboys should at least be able to convincingly sound sad, but Wachito Rico can’t transcend the emotional blankness lurking beneath its zeitgeisty sound. Boy Pablo’s previous discography revolved around unrequited pining, and on this record, he finally gets the girl. But Muñoz can’t seem to come up with anything more interesting to say about the object of his affection than that she’s hot (“Honey”) and he likes hanging out with her (“Nowadays”).
Muñoz’s big brothers in the indie-pop frat house have their respective charms. Alongside the irony and bawdiness, Mac DeMarco offers thoughtfulness and fun; there is a beating heart beneath Real Estate’s wistfulness, and their lush guitar sounds are crafted with care. Even Two Door Cinema Club sound like they sincerely want something. Boy Pablo, meanwhile, seem to have transmuted DeMarco’s mischief into pure condescension for their young audience, and sonically copied Real Estate’s whole fucking flow, word-for-word, bar-for-bar. In the times he attempts to prove he has more to offer than mere virality, Muñoz manages to disrupt the monotony only briefly, mostly by pushing new Latin-American influences to the fore. “Te Vas / Don’t Leave” builds from Spanish guitar and voice to a production of synths and artificial strings, and Muñoz finally pushes himself, approaching something like conviction.
How much is fair to expect from a young indie-pop band? Who should really be blamed for an album like Wachito Rico? Mr. Muñoz, who is frankly too young to sound this jaded? The YouTube algorithm? Mac Demarco, for not raising his failsons strictly enough? Maybe it’s all of us who have humored this type of indie for too long. Social media has truncated the path from the bedroom to the festival stage. We can continue to hope that the absence of the stodgy, gatekept spaces that used to lie between will allow for shocking, unruly artistry. Wachito Rico, though, is a warning against complacency: Bored boys, with a few synth presets, can still stumble their way to stardom.
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